Vox Popoli

Fred Reed, who has seen more war first hand than the entire Chickenhawk Brigade combined, tries to explain why the Iraqi Occupation was lost some time ago:

To the Warrior, to doubt the war is treason, aiding and supporting, liberalism, cowardice, back-stabbing, and so on. He uses these phrases unrelentingly. We must fight, and fight, and fight, and never yield, and sacrifice and spend. We must never ask why, or whether, or what for, or do we want to.

The public of course doesn’t see it that way. In 1964 I graduated from a rural high school in Virginia with a senior class of, I think, sixty. Doug took a 12.7 through the head, Sonny spent time at Walter Reed with neck wounds, Studley I hear is a paraplegic, another kid got mostly blinded for life, and several, whom I won’t name, tough country kids as I knew them, came back as apparently irredeemable drunks. (These were kids I knew, not all in my class.) It was a lot of dead and crippled for a small place. For what?

Cowardice? I was on campus in 1966 on a small, very Republican, very patriotic, very conservative, very Southern campus. The students, and their girlfriends, were all violently against the war. So, I gather, were their parents. Why? Were they the traitors of the Warrior’s imagination? No. They didn’t want to die for something that they didn’t care about.

This eludes the Warrior. Always, he blames The Press for the waning of martial enthusiasm, for his misunderstanding of the kind of war we are fighting. Did the press make Studley a paraplegic? Or kill the guy with all the tubes who died in the stretcher above me on the Medevac 141 back from Danang? Did Walter Cronkite make my buddy Cagle blind when the rifle grenade exploded on the end of his fourteen? Do the Warriors think that people don’t notice when their kids come back forever in wheelchairs?

They don’t get it.

The reality is that Iraq was never going to attack the United States. Nor is Iran – North Korea already has its nukes and isn’t using them for anything except to keep the USA off its back as it starves its people and does otherwise Bad Things.

No amount of exaggeration is going to convince the vast majority of Americans that democracy in Iraq is worth the life of their child. Based on the evidence, I’d argue that democracy in America isn’t worth such a lofty price either.

I respect America’s soldiers. I like them and am comfortable with them, being from a military family and all. But I also loathe the politicians who spend their blood so freely and callously, usually in a cause that is of no benefit to America whatsoever.

The march of technology can be delayed briefly but it can never be arrested. Today North Korea has The Bomb, tomorrow Iran will, and in fifty years, it’s entirely possible that your neighbor will, if he is so inclined. History is replete with examples of central governments attempting to control the spread of military technology; last night I was reading a dictate of Charlemagne’s which forbade the export of burnies, iron chest armor.

We are currently seeing a race to determine if power can be globally centralized before the advance spread of technology renders such centralization suicidal. In such a race, the Way of the Warrior has little, if any, role to play. He will surely again have his day, regardless of who wins out, but he has little to say with regards to the victor.

At least Parenthetical Remarks read the whole thing, both versions, no less. Unfortunately, as you might expect from the sort of blogger who finds Andrew Sullivan inspiring, he is unable to take two seemingly discordant facts and reach a logical conclusion:

Apart from advocating that the U.S. government emulate Hitler in an effort to rid the country of its illegal immigrants, Vox’s article is a bizarre rant against a border fence. Why? “The problem with a fence is that it works both ways,” and building it would lead to “a self-imprisoned people”. What if we have to flee a tyrannical U.S. government at some point in the future? We don’t want no stinking fences in that case.

So, Vox Day appears to be both a fascist sympathizer and a paranoid. Talk about a classic combination! Chocolate and peanut butter don’t have anything on Vox.

Throw an unusual haircut into that Gordian knot and, well, obviously the whole thing is a hopeless conundrum beyond the best minds of the blogosphere.

I suspect you’ll be seeing more of these five names together in the future:

In the legends of the University of Chicago, the late, irrepressible Jason Aronson etched a memorable place with a dissertation that encompassed Louis Hartz and the Earl of Shaftsbury: “Hartz, Shaftsbury, and Marx: An Unsuitable Trio.” But just a couple of weeks ago, Aronson’s strange grouping was superseded by what could be called an Unsuitable or Implausible Quintet: Roberts, Stevens, Souter, Breyer, Ginsburg….

But… but… Roberts is a conservative! That he is, just like the man who hired him, George W. Bush. Oh, he’ll vote with Scalia and crew when it doesn’t matter, to be sure. But when it counts, I expect he’ll be right there with the other Republican-nominated liberals.

Now that the double-digits and illiterates have shrieked themselves hoarse, we return you to your original programming… and a belated response to Daniel’s substantive critique on women in the workforce and their effect on the economy:

I still stand by my assertations that: (A) women in the workforce give employers more choice in selecting employees and allow for better overall employee value (in the absence of government interference in selection of employees or amounts paid to them), and (B) any drops in wage rates are compensated by drops in prices and better selection due to the increased productivity of having a larger worker pool in a free market.

The obvious short response is that this is a purely theoretical argument with no relation to an actual economy. An “absence of government interference” indeed! But that’s too easy, so let’s cast about and see if we can find a practical example that doesn’t involve hard-to-find statistics as a metric.

In 1937, the National Socialist regime employed 45 percent women in its agencies… okay, actually I have no idea who they hired nor is it relevant to Daniel’s question, I was just amused by the notion of seeing the usual morons get in a lather over another Nazi analogy. I’m a little confused, though. Is it “Bush is Hitler” or “Milosevic/Hussein/Ahmadinejad/Insert Next Neocon Target Here is Hitler” that is the acceptable Nazi analogy?

Actually, the historical example I have in mind is the American professariat. “According to a study done by the American Association of University Professors, about 26 percent of all tenured professors nationwide are women.” This was the case in 1999. I don’t have any precise dates on when the first female professors began being hired en masse and began to receive tenure, but various searches tends to show up relevant “first” dates ranging between 1969 and 1985.

According to Daniel’s theory, this broadening of the pool of potential professors should have increased the quality of the professors being hired and granted tenure. With the exception of the politically correct Left, however, few would agree that this has been the case. Certainly the results produced by those professors, as measured by the quality of their graduated students, have declined appreciably over the last 30+ years by nearly everyone’s measure.

The same holds true for other aspects of the workplace. If Worker X is 5 percent more productive than Worker Y, but reduces productivity by 10 percent in Workers A through S, hiring Worker X will be a disaster for the employer. The further inaccuracy of the theory stems from its reliance on the idea that the productivity of a worker can be ascertained prior to hiring.

B is too complex a matter to discuss here without first settling on agreed values regarding prices and productivity. As I am a confirmed CPI cynic, this promises to be difficult but I am open to suggestion.

Wes Pruden notes a little item hidden out of sight in the Senate immigration bill:

One provision tucked away in the fine print would grant an immigration visa to any woman or orphan anywhere in the world who is “at risk of harm” because of age or sex. The critics of the president’s amnesty fiesta thought they were kidding when they said the president and the Senate wanted to grant citizenship once and for all to everyone in the world.

It seems that when Dear Jorge said that when someone is hurting, government has to act, he wasn’t only referring to Americans. I hear there’s a ten year-old girl in Tibet who stubbed her toe yesterday, surely the administration will be seeking to grant her a visa and welfare benefits tomorrow.

This provision would also logically grant immigration rights to every single widow and female fetus in India.

Hey, 12 million, 300 million, whatever, bring them all in. Why not? It’s party time and we’ve got the helicopter money to pay for it, thanks to a little invention that Ben Bernanke likes to call the printing press. And if oil prices keep climbing, everyone can keep warm this winter with 10 pregnant Hindi-speaking women huddled together in their homes.

Things started off badly this afternoon when the channel on which the Champions League final was on mysteriously went out fifteen minutes before kickoff. Believe me, I was approximately 100x more distraught about that than about the minor Hitlerian hissy fit of the past few days or my recent discovery that WND decided to belatedly edit last Monday’s column.

But I quickly located a bar with the game and settled in just in time to see Lehman commit an egregious foul and get a red card in the 16th minute. It should have been a Barca goal, too, based on the Advantage concept, but the referee cocked it up and only awarded a free kick, which Ronaldinho missed.

By the way, Ronaldinho is breathtakingly good. His through pass to Eto’o on the red card play was phenomenal.

I was sitting near three Sicilian Barca fans, who, upon discovering that I am an Arsenalista, immediately invited me to join them and passed along the first of many glasses of prosecco. Eboue took a dive and drew an undeserved foul, which Henry and Sol Campbell immediately converted into a textbook free kick, header and goal. One nil to the Arsenal! The Sicilians and I conferred and decided that a) the goal was pretty, but undeserved, b) but Barca was up a man and if they couldn’t score in the remaining hour with a man advantage they would deserve to lose, and c) we urgently required more prosecco.

Arsenal went into a defensive shell once going up a goal, but gradually became more confident and actually began seriously attacking between the 60th and 70th minutes. Hleb blew a nice opportunity and Henry could have put the game away on a one-on-one with the Barca keeper but failed to do so, and sadly, the Gunners began to run out of gas. Eto’o scored a lovely goal in the 76th minute thanks to a perfect pass from Henrik Larson – I got very nervous when I saw him come in as a sub, presciently enough – and that wretched Swede created a second Barca goal that was essentially an own goal off Arsenal’s replacement keeper that won the game for the Spaniards in the 81st minute.

So, as injury time wound down, we drank a salute to the victorious Barcelona squad, another to an Arsenal squad that was noble in defeat and a third to whoever busted Moggi and the crooks of Juventus. Suffice it to say that a very good time was had by all.

I can’t wait for the Mondiale.

The WB emails:

Who edited your column? Are you pissed?

No, not at all. WND regularly edits my column, albeit usually before it appears. I actually turned this one in early, so this was clearly on Mr. Farah’s orders. I happen to know that he really, really, really didn’t like it.

But, to his credit, he didn’t get on my case or even shake his finger at me, he merely exercised his prerogative to edit a piece that appears on his web site. His house, his rules, I have no problem with that. They killed an entire piece of mine two years ago, no one ever knew because I simply wrote another piece on a different topic and that was that.

BW is a bit irritated, however:

WHAT HAPPENED?!?!?! Here we are defending that column, and when I went to refer to it for some quotes to use in rebutting one of Ken Prescott’s fallacies, it was changed. The offending comparison is removed, and, unless I’m mistaken, there are other changes. Can you provide an undedited text?

Of course. This sort of thing is one reason why I provide an alternative column archive that isn’t subject to WND’s concerns. The original piece, as written, is right here.

I disagree with Mr. Farah’s actions, of course, just as I disagreed with his decision to panic and endorse George Bush right before the 2004 election. But you see, I am a genuine libertarian and I don’t expect to control the actions of others. I have no problem with Mr. Farah’s decisions and respect his right to do whatever he likes with his site.

Oso con Queso and Dan, meanwhile, suspect I did it:

Maybe it was Vox who edited the column…. I’m still leaning towards Vox having asked for the edit.

Couldn’t handle the heat?

Right, that’s why I’ve been methodically beating down the illiterates and have an unedited copy on my own site. You two are welcome to stick around, being more rational than most of my critics – you’d be surprised how many regulars started as critics, in fact, not the majority but more than a dozen – but you obviously aren’t very familiar with me.

I’m prepared to believe that you don’t actually advocate murdering all illegal immigrants, but SURELY you must concede that tossing a reference to Nazi Germany into your column was bound to provoke a frenzy. Why exactly did you go with Nazi Germany, when Slobodan Milosevic’s tactics toward Kosovar Albanians seems more in line with what you’re proposing? No need to conjure up images of the Holocaust, trains, and concentration camps when you’ve got a perfectly good roster of historical examples that seem (as far as I understand you) to correspond much more closely to simple, old-fashioned mass deportation….

Why DID you use that particular example? I’m obviously not implying that you’re a neo-fascist or a racial purist. Just wondering why you didn’t instead recommend the Ottoman Empire, Milosevic, and the US vis a vis the Indians as examples, since all of them seem much closer to what you propose.

There were certainly a number of historical examples I could have used, but the one from National Socialist Germany seemed the most apt to me for three reasons. First, the number 12 million has been bandied about lately with regards to illegal aliens and I was reading Robert Wisnich’s book not so long ago, so when I read about Bush declaring how it wouldn’t work to deport so terribly many, the first thing that sprang to mind was something on the order of “for Pete’s sake, the Endlosung took less than four years and that’s half 12 million right there.”

Second, most people are woefully ignorant of history. You’d be amazed at how many people emailed to inform me that the National Socialists KILLED 6 million Jews. No, really, Mr. History PhD? Given that perhaps one in five readers could identify Milosevic or the Ottoman Empire, much less the Polish postwar expulsion and murder of one million ethnic Germans, it made sense to go with something readers would at least have heard of.

Third, I believe that the Third Way politics practiced by the Bush-Clintons and the Blair-Camerons are a modified version of the original Third Way, more infamously known as fascism. I’ve been reading a history entitled FASCISTI by Giordano Bruno Guerri in the last week and the similarities between the development of the historical cult of the nation and the modern cult of multiculturalism are striking.

But it’s a poor effort indeed:

t seems Vox Populi, the blog Vox Day has, is taking me up on the offer. He has already misread my contempt and refusal to tolerate defense of his indefensible column as me being a “Chickenboy”. To do so… well, that says more about you than me, Mr. Day. My anger and disgust with your column comes due to the fact that I think the first principles that this country was founded on mean something. Particularly, when we laid out the reasons for breaking away from England:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Let the irrelevant preening begin!

Now, let’s lay some cards down on the table. If we, as Americans, are to believe what Thomas Jefferson wrote, then the following statement in the President’s speech is non-controversial:

We must always remember that real lives will be affected by our debates and decisions, and that every human being has dignity and value no matter what their citizenship papers say.

Then how are we to react when someone writes the following statement?

And he will be lying, again, just as he lied when he said: “Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic – it’s just not going to work.”

Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.

You don’t have to bring Thomas Jefferson into it in order to read the following and very simple argument.

George Bush said X. George Bush lied. Here’s an example of proof to the contrary only 65 years old. The correct way to react is to examine the proof and decide if it is sufficient to determine whether George Bush lied or not. As it happens, he did. I find it interesting that to a man, the conservatives “outraged” by my comments are all Bush supporters; none of them have admitted that my bust of Bush’s lie is spot-on.

Furthermore, Thomas Jefferson is not Holy Writ and while Harold may be informed by the man’s words every time you place fingertips on keyboard, I am not. And finally, deporting an illegal alien does not detract from his basic human worth any more than arresting him for shoplifting does.

Let’s be honest about the Nazis. They felt that there was a super-race – they called it Aryans. Other races were to be subjected – to be slaves, or second-class citizens. They targeted Jews, gypsies, and others for extermination, also known as the Holocaust. And you, Mr. Day, were at the very least, using it as a way to rebut the President of the United States. You might call yourself a libertarian, but your column came across as something far different from that, and extremely odious. It’s not quite the worst that I have seen.

My column came across as nothing of the sort to anyone not looking to preen for the masses and pretend outrage. I neither endorsed mass deportation nor supported a border fence, in fact, I came out explicitly against the latter in case you missed the title and the vast majority of the column. German history is real and provides those who study history with many examples, some evil, some good and some neutral. The mere mention of National Socialist Germany is not synonymous with sympathy for its policies, and unlike you, I actually know what they were.

Since I don’t merely call myself a libertarian but actually happen to be one, I also support far fewer of them than you do, Harold.

That’s what this comes down to. You are either with Thomas Jefferson and President Bush, or you are with the perpetrators of one of the most evil acts in recorded history. I do not think that any sort of middle ground is possible in this – nor can such a blanket endorsement be explained away as merely “drawing upon the lessons of history”. Because if it can be done to 12 million illegals, who else can it be done to?

That’s the most feeble false dichotomy I’ve seen in several years of this blog. You’re a laughable joke, Harold. Mass slaughter has been with mankind for all of recorded history and only by preventing a power imbalance on the side of central government can it be avoided. Thomas Jefferson and George Bush are on different sides of that debate, you sad cretin.

Slopes can get very slippery, as we have seen on other issues. We’ve gone from debates over whether or not a woman has the right to terminate a pregnancy or whether someone has the right to have a living will to seeing a Western European country practice out-and-out euthanasia, and debate over whether it should be legalized here.

In the same vein, we also see that from those who wish to practice gun control. It starts with just a few things – bans on guns that have “no legitimate sporting purposes”, as the gun-control advocates claim. But then they demand more and more. Soon, they want to tell you how many you will be allowed to have in a month. Then they want to make you demonstrate to someone else that you need a given gun.

Agreed.

The reason I’m calling you a Nazi, Mr. Day, is because your column seems to have a lot more in common with them than it did with what this country is founded on. So you don’t like Michelle Malkin. Big deal.

Yes, clearly the National Socialists were opposed to strong central government, as I explicitly opposed in my column. Furthermore, I have nothing personal against Michelle Malkin, I opposed her fraudulent defense of internment because it was a) historically inaccurate and b) an advocation of increasing central state power. That is absolutely relevant to the matter under discussion and also eliminates your ridiculous case.

When it comes to the principles espoused by Jefferson vs. the actions of Hitler, there is no middle ground, Mr. Day. You’re with one or the other, as is the case in the war on terror. I’m going to follow the President’s lead and err on the side of Thomas Jefferson’s principles. You are free to say or do otherwise, but complaining when you get called out on it looks bad. A pitcher who complains about a batter charging the mound after getting plunked by a pitch looks better.

False dichotomy, again. I’m not complaining at all, I’m openly mocking quasi-illiterate morons like you, Michael Medved and others who leaped before they looked.

You sent some of your fans to come on over and talk trash. But I see that none of them even tried to defend what you wrote. If you can reconcile citing what Nazi Germany did to Jews with the notion that even illegal immigrants – as human beings – have dignity and value, then do so. If you find that it is impossible, then have the courage – and honesty – to come out and say so. If you lack the ability to do either, then say so. Are you too chicken to do so?

And now Young Harold is reduced to lying. I didn’t send anyone over to his web site, nor, as you can see for yourself, did anyone talk trash. Furthermore, several people openly defended what I wrote, which, if you look at the time stamps of Harold’s second post compared to that of the comments, proves that he is blatantly lying.

There is nothing inherently contradictory in citing something bad that on
e group of people did to another group of people and asserting that human beings have dignity and value. Harold has a strangely limited little mind that sees nonexistent dichotomies everywhere even as he misses rather obvious ones, like Jefferson v. Bush and National Socialism v. libertarianism.

In summary, a truly pathetic attempt, Harold. False dichotomies, demonstrations of both ideological ignorance and reading comprehension problems, and finally, a resort to two outright lies. You would have been better off running home to Mommy.

But on an amusing final note, Harold also posted this:

In the two days since Vox Day’s column, Michelle has to have known that there was a controversy. She has not found the time to say a single word about Mr. Day’s odious column, but did find time to write an insulting column filled with hyperbole, to complain about 22 Senators who didn’t vote the way she would have had them vote, and to live-blog a speech she’d made her mind up on before even listening to.

Yeah, you’ll likely be waiting a long, long time before Michelle Malkin has anything to say about me, Harold. And you can be absolutely sure it has nothing whatsoever to do with her secretly agreeing with me or harboring a hidden passion for my smoldering sexuality.

Jonah Goldberg gets confused playing Animal, Vegetable, Mineral:

So this seems like a propitious time to ask: What if illegal immigrants were crack?

But for me the most interesting similarity is the issue of futility and will. Drug-war doves claim that you can’t win the drug war because you can’t defeat the laws of supply and demand. As long as there is demand for drugs, there will be a supply, and no acceptable amount of militarization of the drug war will change that. This argument gets flipped on its head when it comes to immigration. Suddenly, militarization is essential to the top priority of cutting off supply.

But the fact is, in all likelihood your average illegal immigrant, desperate to start a new life for himself and provide for his family, will be no less determined to sell his labor than a drug dealer would be to sell his goods.

Some drug legalization advocates hang their position on a lot of moral preening about the absolute right of the individual to do what he wants. But many of the same people will then argue that it is—and should be—an outrageous crime to hire an illegal immigrant. Well, conservative economic dogma considers the right to form contracts with whomever you wish to be sacrosanct. It is “the socialist society” according to the philosopher Robert Nozick, “which would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.”

Four obvious problems with Mr. Goldberg’s whacky argument.

1. People are significantly harder to hide than crack. The obvious size differences aside, one gets smoked and is gone. The other has numerous and routine interactions with various local, state and federal employees.

2. Corporations aren’t individuals. The sacrosanct right of the individual to form a contract should not be confused with the right of a government formed, licensed and regulated creation to do so, historic legal fictions notwithstanding.

3. The demand for cheap labor is significantly lower than the demand for crack. One seldom sees CEOs of Fortune 500 companies cruising around bad neighborhoods at night, desperately searching for Mexicans to clean the toilets, after all.

4. The profit incentive is much lower. A cheap illegal Mexican costs one-third to one-half that of a legal American. The profit on crack is considerably more than a mere 100 to 200 percent.

His suggestion was momentarily interesting but after five seconds thought, color me underwhelmed.